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They’re strategically exceptional, but beyond that a lot of their products (or subsidiaries) are also dominant for good reason (vscode, GitHub). O365 and the p

They’re strategically exceptional, but beyond that a lot of their products (or subsidiaries) are also dominant for good reason (vscode, GitHub). O365 and the product integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart. Slack sold out to languish at salesforce while Microsoft will now just own that space. Cherry picking a Microsoft app for macOS is like looking at iTunes on windows, it’s not really representative. Even Windows itself isn’t that important (that was one of the big strategic changes after Ballmer left and Nadella took over). You’re right about edge though (which is why Microsoft abandoned it for WebKit). Microsoft also ships (something Google can’t do very well). I think their current trajectory is probably undervalued because people have not properly updated from outdated historical sentiment.

adzm 4y ago
Unfortunate about slack. It really seems to have stagnated. At least we have discord; I'm really glad they turned down Microsoft's 12 billion offer.
- gonehome 4y ago
  I think it's more about salesforce, I have a pretty negative opinion about them and everything they acquire seems to limp along or die (and the good employees leave immediately) - just seems like a boring place to be (nice sky scraper though). Microsoft has a better track record with acquisitions.
  - eloisius 4y ago
    Salesforce wastes all their effort on new acquisitions making business-driven decisions like “add Einstein to it!” or “integrate it with the Lightning Experience (TM)!” instead of doing anything remotely useful to pre-acquisition customers. Once it’s adequately diced up, they can add it as another line-item to renewals who already pay so much money to salesforce that they don’t care.
- toastal 4y ago
  > at least we have Discord Poe's Law?
- nicce 4y ago
  Discord is yet another walled garden to be fair. It might be good replacement for some little, private communities. But also large communities are moving into Discord instead of using some public, index-able and findable platforms. They used to be public in the past and people very able to read information about them without going process for creating account, acceptance or even finding whole community. Discord is terrible for storing long term information in text form. People try to keep some pinned posts but no.. information disappears, when in comparison for forums it was there. And let's not start with privacy.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    > information disappears Wait really? I've never seen that happen on Discord, I can still see messages from over half a decade ago. Why would they delete data they mine? Slack on the other hand deletes everything immediately if you're not on the paid plan of course.
    - veb 4y ago
      Not _immediately_ I think it's after 10,000 messages they start to remove some.
      - anticensor 4y ago
        That 10k messages amount to less than a day in a highly active business.
    - nicce 4y ago
      > information disappears Main point was that you can't access or view it without creating the account at first, or even being able to find the whole server. You might even need to give phone number before you can view anything. Then wait 30min to verify that you are not a bot. And all this to find a solution for a problem which you might never return to. The search in Discord is kinda terrible. Also, if you are couple days or even hours late for the discussion, it might be too late to take part or continue it in large communities. Discord lives in the moment, it is not a place to store information. On the other hand, on forums, it is not a problem to continue some discussion couple days later. The quality is often much much higher.
jackosdev 4y ago
vscode is an incredible piece of software, better than all the paid options in my opinion, the amount of features they pump out month to month is outstanding, just a bit slow due to electron. I never understood why they put so much effort into a free product that I run from Linux and Mac, but I'm happily paying the copilot subscription so it all makes sense now.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  You honestly had me do a double take. Copilot costs money? Maybe I get it through some other thing, but its been free for me as long as I can remember. It's wrong so often that I generally keep it on because it's entertaining. I wouldn't pay for it.
  - GartzenDeHaes 4y ago
    You might be thinking of IntelliCode, which was released in 2019. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/
    - withinboredom 4y ago
      No, I use in PHPStorm as a plug-in.
  - infinityio 4y ago
    I think copilot is free in the education pack - you might have got it from there?
    - withinboredom 4y ago
      Looks like I get it through my organization.
- bombela 4y ago
  It's free and electron because they can run it in a web browser, running everything on MS Azure. With code on GitHub and CI on GitHub etc etc. The whole dev experience offered to companies as a service via a series of web applications. Companies will love this. Just get any web browser, preferably Microsoft Edge on a Microsoft Window Pro on a Microsoft Surface laptop. Open Microsoft GitHub workspace. To dev for your Microsoft Azure hosted Linux VM. Run the CI on GitHub. Use Microsoft O365 for your design doc. And Microsoft Team for communication. Poor little Linux in the middle.
matwood 4y ago
> integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart Teams is terrible software and only beat Slack b/c it is included 'free' in every o365 sub. GSuite is much better at collaboration than o365, but because of decades of MS lock in most people still need office to deal with interop. Slack recognized it was going to be hard to compete with a free feature from a product suite most companies are forced to have. SF could have been a good home, but they struggle at handling acquisitions.
zelphirkalt 4y ago
Slack sucks, but if you compare it with Teams, it is still gold. If anyone asks me, whether I wulould rather join a voice chat on Slack or Teams, the answer is 100% of the time Slack. You never know what bugs Teams will cook up this time to ruin your call. O365 is a child's toy for non-professional document creation. Quickly hacking a document together maybe. Any normal non-web office suite blows O365 out of the water in terms of creating maintainable non-directly formatted documents. Now that they are deprecating offline Office (I think last release 2017 or so) their office suite has gone downhill at alarming speed. VS Codium is OKish, and has some cool features, but ultimately does not get close to what I have in Emacs in most aspects that actually matter, so that's not a convincing offer either. Their software is OK at best and rubbish in the average. And don't even get me started on Windows itself.
- mynameisash 4y ago
  A quick search turns up Office 2021[0], and I see no indication that offline Office is being discontinued. And claiming that O365 is a toy? Literally the only other online office suite I've used or heard of is GDocs, which has a fraction of the functionality that I use from O365. Your post doesn't sound serious at all to me. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-professional-2021/cfq7ttc0hhj9?activetab=pivot:overviewtab https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-profe...
  - gonehome 4y ago
    It was clear to me when they mentioned Emacs that their opinion on this can just be ignored. That isn't to say Emacs isn't a great thing for a certain niche, but it's just not something that matters in this kind of strategic product discussion (and thinking it's comparable is just a signal it's not worth engaging imo). There are many reasons why VSCode is dominant and emacs isn't, similarly there are many reasons slack failed to compete (even after taking out a full page ad pretending to be apple before suing Microsoft). If you're going to pretend to be apple, you better be as good. If you're going to mock competition you better hope you're apple and not netscape [0][1]. I too think Slack is a great product, but that's not enough. Slack needed to expand into a more competitive offering and they failed to do that. [0]: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/browser-wars/ https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/browser-wars/ [1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/slack-microsoft-open-letter_n_581a0e66e4b01f610e396815 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/slack-microsoft-open-letter_n...
moffkalast 4y ago
> lot of their products > GitHub Yeah that one doesn't count, they've made exactly zero changes since acquisition and Actions still has downtime every few weeks.

adzm 4y ago

Unfortunate about slack. It really seems to have stagnated. At least we have discord; I'm really glad they turned down Microsoft's 12 billion offer.

gonehome 4y ago
I think it's more about salesforce, I have a pretty negative opinion about them and everything they acquire seems to limp along or die (and the good employees leave immediately) - just seems like a boring place to be (nice sky scraper though). Microsoft has a better track record with acquisitions.
- eloisius 4y ago
  Salesforce wastes all their effort on new acquisitions making business-driven decisions like “add Einstein to it!” or “integrate it with the Lightning Experience (TM)!” instead of doing anything remotely useful to pre-acquisition customers. Once it’s adequately diced up, they can add it as another line-item to renewals who already pay so much money to salesforce that they don’t care.
toastal 4y ago
> at least we have Discord Poe's Law?
nicce 4y ago
Discord is yet another walled garden to be fair. It might be good replacement for some little, private communities. But also large communities are moving into Discord instead of using some public, index-able and findable platforms. They used to be public in the past and people very able to read information about them without going process for creating account, acceptance or even finding whole community. Discord is terrible for storing long term information in text form. People try to keep some pinned posts but no.. information disappears, when in comparison for forums it was there. And let's not start with privacy.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  > information disappears Wait really? I've never seen that happen on Discord, I can still see messages from over half a decade ago. Why would they delete data they mine? Slack on the other hand deletes everything immediately if you're not on the paid plan of course.
  - veb 4y ago
    Not _immediately_ I think it's after 10,000 messages they start to remove some.
    - anticensor 4y ago
      That 10k messages amount to less than a day in a highly active business.
  - nicce 4y ago
    > information disappears Main point was that you can't access or view it without creating the account at first, or even being able to find the whole server. You might even need to give phone number before you can view anything. Then wait 30min to verify that you are not a bot. And all this to find a solution for a problem which you might never return to. The search in Discord is kinda terrible. Also, if you are couple days or even hours late for the discussion, it might be too late to take part or continue it in large communities. Discord lives in the moment, it is not a place to store information. On the other hand, on forums, it is not a problem to continue some discussion couple days later. The quality is often much much higher.

jackosdev 4y ago

vscode is an incredible piece of software, better than all the paid options in my opinion, the amount of features they pump out month to month is outstanding, just a bit slow due to electron. I never understood why they put so much effort into a free product that I run from Linux and Mac, but I'm happily paying the copilot subscription so it all makes sense now.

withinboredom 4y ago
You honestly had me do a double take. Copilot costs money? Maybe I get it through some other thing, but its been free for me as long as I can remember. It's wrong so often that I generally keep it on because it's entertaining. I wouldn't pay for it.
- GartzenDeHaes 4y ago
  You might be thinking of IntelliCode, which was released in 2019. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    No, I use in PHPStorm as a plug-in.
- infinityio 4y ago
  I think copilot is free in the education pack - you might have got it from there?
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    Looks like I get it through my organization.
bombela 4y ago
It's free and electron because they can run it in a web browser, running everything on MS Azure. With code on GitHub and CI on GitHub etc etc. The whole dev experience offered to companies as a service via a series of web applications. Companies will love this. Just get any web browser, preferably Microsoft Edge on a Microsoft Window Pro on a Microsoft Surface laptop. Open Microsoft GitHub workspace. To dev for your Microsoft Azure hosted Linux VM. Run the CI on GitHub. Use Microsoft O365 for your design doc. And Microsoft Team for communication. Poor little Linux in the middle.

matwood 4y ago

> integration there (teams) is why they crushed slack despite slack’s headstart Teams is terrible software and only beat Slack b/c it is included 'free' in every o365 sub. GSuite is much better at collaboration than o365, but because of decades of MS lock in most people still need office to deal with interop. Slack recognized it was going to be hard to compete with a free feature from a product suite most companies are forced to have. SF could have been a good home, but they struggle at handling acquisitions.

zelphirkalt 4y ago

Slack sucks, but if you compare it with Teams, it is still gold. If anyone asks me, whether I wulould rather join a voice chat on Slack or Teams, the answer is 100% of the time Slack. You never know what bugs Teams will cook up this time to ruin your call. O365 is a child's toy for non-professional document creation. Quickly hacking a document together maybe. Any normal non-web office suite blows O365 out of the water in terms of creating maintainable non-directly formatted documents. Now that they are deprecating offline Office (I think last release 2017 or so) their office suite has gone downhill at alarming speed. VS Codium is OKish, and has some cool features, but ultimately does not get close to what I have in Emacs in most aspects that actually matter, so that's not a convincing offer either. Their software is OK at best and rubbish in the average. And don't even get me started on Windows itself.

mynameisash 4y ago
A quick search turns up Office 2021[0], and I see no indication that offline Office is being discontinued. And claiming that O365 is a toy? Literally the only other online office suite I've used or heard of is GDocs, which has a fraction of the functionality that I use from O365. Your post doesn't sound serious at all to me. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-professional-2021/cfq7ttc0hhj9?activetab=pivot:overviewtab https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-profe...
- gonehome 4y ago
  It was clear to me when they mentioned Emacs that their opinion on this can just be ignored. That isn't to say Emacs isn't a great thing for a certain niche, but it's just not something that matters in this kind of strategic product discussion (and thinking it's comparable is just a signal it's not worth engaging imo). There are many reasons why VSCode is dominant and emacs isn't, similarly there are many reasons slack failed to compete (even after taking out a full page ad pretending to be apple before suing Microsoft). If you're going to pretend to be apple, you better be as good. If you're going to mock competition you better hope you're apple and not netscape [0][1]. I too think Slack is a great product, but that's not enough. Slack needed to expand into a more competitive offering and they failed to do that. [0]: https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/browser-wars/ https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/browser-wars/ [1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/slack-microsoft-open-letter_n_581a0e66e4b01f610e396815 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/slack-microsoft-open-letter_n...

moffkalast 4y ago

> lot of their products > GitHub Yeah that one doesn't count, they've made exactly zero changes since acquisition and Actions still has downtime every few weeks.